Last Friday night, cast members were among the first to preview the revised Star Tours—The Adventures Continue at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. After the conclusion of the next morning’s cast previews, the ride went into a soft-opening status to the general public, and has been open for previews since that time. It is expected to remain in soft-open status until final preparations are under way for the Thursday night media preview (7-9:30 p.m.) and Disney Parks Blog Tweet-Up (midnight to 2 a.m.), and Friday morning’s Grand Opening Moment (10:15-10:40 a.m.). We’ll try to fill you in a bit about the attraction without giving too much away.

The second room of the queue is now a security check area, similar to a TSA checkpoint. The two G-series droids are still there, G2-9T scanning luggage and G2-4T scanning passengers. For those attraction junkies, you’ll remember that the G-series droids are so named because in the original Disneyland Park version of the ride, they were created by removing the “skins” from two of the goose animatronics from the soon-to-close America Sings attraction (Goose = “G” series). While we won’t tell you why, you’ll enjoy paying a lot of attention to what the scans of the luggage show is inside. When it’s your turn to go through the passenger scan (a thermal body scan), you may be verbally accosted by a security droid. Also, keep an eye out in the queue for an earlier version of RX-24 (“Captain Rex”) from the original Star Tours; he’s labeled “defective” and has some familiar dialogue.

The new pre-boarding video no longer shows park guests as being among the passengers, as this is now the first time that departures are leaving from the new Earth station. You’ll want to watch this video closely for maximum enjoyment. The new 3-D glasses are different from those used in the other four theme park 3-D movies, and are reportedly more comfortable and provide more complete 3-D viewing.

From M.o.1 -- This is more acclimating to security checkpoints in the future but more importantly taking away the "human" factor of the whole issue. As it stands, would people have the same kind of issues being searched by a machine as they would being searched by the human being? There is also an element of showing thermal scans along w/ getting the future used to being searched as a normal event. This happened a long time ago as well with the movie entitled "Total Recall". That was the first place where you saw such checkpoints that we are seeing today being used in a film at least to the best of my knowledge. More have been made since then.